'My Taste Is Rather Boringly Conventional'

Readers often ask interesting questions. One wrote on Tuesday to say he enjoyed the “great variety” of writers and books I write about at Anecdotal Evidence. “I don’t see a consistent theme or genre or even a nationality,” he says. “Nothing you would choose to blog about would surprise me.” That’s reassuring. I like variety and don’t like to repeat myself too often. Then he asks questions I’ve never asked myself: “How would you define your taste? What do all the books and writers you like have in common?” My immediate, honest, unrehearsed answer: You got me. 

I’ve never looked for a grand unifying theory of anything. (One of the reasons I’ve lost most of my earlier interest in Coleridge.)  I have a tolerance for inconsistency in writers and humans in general, but I also have prejudices that I can’t defend critically. I try to avoid bald-face snobbery, though it creeps in. And these prejudices have changed over time, which seems to me a natural progression. Taste, like other aspects of maturity, evolves. Once I liked science fiction. Now I don’t. Once I loved Thomas Pynchon’s novels. Now I don’t. That doesn’t imply that I think readers of sci-fi or Gravity’s Rainbow are cretins. What I’m describing is growing up. Human personality is dynamic and protean. It’s always changing yet remaining identifiably the same – us.

 

If I had to give a one-sentence definition of my taste in literature, I would say it has to be well-written. I understand how nebulous and subjective a quality that is. I don’t like sloppy indifference to style. Neither do I like the flowery stuff, style as mere gingerbread. My idea of a great stylist in prose is Max Beerbohm. In poetry, J.V. Cunningham. Two utterly different sorts of writers.

 

Joseph Epstein published the essay “Such Good Taste” in the Spring 1993 issue of The American Scholar and collected it in With My Trousers Rolled (1995). As usual, Epstein is sensible and often speaks for me:

 

“That one’s taste is best revealed by one’s enthusiasms seems very intelligent, too, except that I am not at all sure I can define my taste by my own enthusiasms. I not only have a fairly strong inconsistency, in my view a happy inconsistency, of taste--I am one of those people who can watch a professional football game in the afternoon and then go off to a chamber music concert in the evening--but in so many realms my taste is rather boringly conventional.”

 

My bent exactly, except I detest sports. (See what I mean?) I suggest my reader seek out Epstein’s essay. Yes, he speaks for me except when he doesn’t. Humor is notoriously personal. Don Rickles cracks me up, leaves me helpless and tear-stained. Not so for many others. As you would expect, Epstein is good on humor:

 

“Nor does my taste always seem coherent. Take humor. I find Henny Youngman very funny. But I also love Max Beerbohm, who, among other knockout remarks, once, considering Freud, said: “They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses.” W. C. Fields can also do the job for me. I am not above caving in at slapstick: a Buster Keaton walk into a wall, say, or an Oliver Hardy fall through a floor. But then I also think Henry James a very funny man.”